What do Buddy Media, et al do? In a nutshell, they help advertisers make sense of and manage social marketing campaigns. In demand, first of all, are social “listening” tools that analyze sentiment on services like Twitter. Companies want to understand what people are tweeting about them, be it positive or negative. They also want to be able to respond to customers who contact them via Twitter or Facebook. This is the specialty of Collective Intellect as well as another company, Radian6, that Salesforce bought for$350 million a year ago.

Advertisers also want help managing marketing campaigns on all the various social networks, from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube to Google+. That’s the bailiwick of Buddy Media and Vitrue, acquired just two weeks ago by Oracle.

Why are Oracle and Salesforce buying these companies? Each is a big player in “customer relationship management” software, a component of which is used to manage marketing campaigns. These moves suggest social marketing is becomingmore important for mainstream advertisers.